Sr. Researcher

Mission

We're looking for a Senior Experience Researcher to help make looking for health insurance work better. eHealth gives people and small businesses all the tools they need to make providing health insurance for themselves and others simpler, more pleasant, and more productive.

It's complex looking for healthcare. It's not always just about making information consumable, it's can also be about helping customers deal with existential fears. So making that experience better is the perfect challenge for any researcher who is looking to contribute to people's lives and meet real needs. If you've been conducting research for digital natives for your whole career, then be ready to continue helping them, but you will also be working for those on the other side of the digital divide - the poor and the elderly.

We are helping them get plans too - plans that include Medicare related plans and family health plans.

Whatever product you are working on, you will always find that the customers who are using them are not abstract y may even be your friends and family.

Our researchers do more than help create better online experiences. We are looking for researchers who are both tactical AND strategic. We work with a product team that wants us to help define product requirements. So, we take the insights we've gained about our customers - how they shop for healthcare, and their needs - and use them to help shape product strategy and invent new products.

In many ways, our researchers are closer than anyone to our customer. We need your voice early on in product ideation. That said, you will also have to see both sides of the products. Not only will you see products from the customer viewpoint, you'll learn about how they are shaped by insurance agencies and the government.

If you want to be in the middle of one of the most important conversations in America, then work here.

If you also have a passion for hard core transactional online experiences, this is an interesting place to hone your craft. For example we need to learn about where the customer is health-wise in order to recommend some plans. We can easily default to how insurance providers ask questions and run customers through a massive decision tree. But people may see the same information differently.

It's part of their story. It's what they did last year. It's what has happened to them and where they are headed. So could it be better to help them tell the story of their health first and learn from that - make that our starting point rather than an insurers form? We need researchers partnering with product managers and designers to help sort out these kinds of questions to make real advances.

It's a fun and absorbing challenge.

You will also do your own dirty work by producing a full range of research deliverables that may include screeners, interview scripts, and presentations on accessibility. Your activities may include moderating, conducting primary research, and actively engaging in the process of product design to help keep knowledge about the customer alive and applied.

You will be working as part of the Design Team. We have years of experience on the team and have pulled people together from a range of leading design teams such as Amazon's Mobile Innovation and Augmented Reality Team, Disney, Hallmark Labs, Macy's Integrated Retail Labs and Walgreen's retail design team. We have your back and are all bringing something to the table.

We provide a highly customer-centric, team-oriented environment in our offices located in San Francisco, California. We also have a secondary location for the team within eHealth's offices in Santa Clara and may consider blending time in the office with working from home. We have a culture that

• demands authentic empathy for our customers
• is excited by the business mission of the company
• runs on collaboration with other disciplines
• requires you to come up with ideas on your own
• takes a collectivist approach to creating design processes, tools and methodologies
• has strong and opinionated leadership pushing the department to evolve
• supports everyone in having long and passionate careers
• recognizes the need to have a balanced life that includes family, friends, health and wellness
• demand authenticity
• seeks to humanize technology
• looks for connections into the larger Bay Area design and research community

• Contribute to products that may include individual health plans, family plans, plans for small businesses and a range of Medicare related plans
• Work with designers to pitch product ideas to cross discipline groups and co-write product specs
• Proactively plan and execute customer research throughout the design and development lifecycle, from early strategic direction through post-release validation
• Share customer insights with the broader organization to increase customer intelligence, including posters, theater, blog posts, and workshops
• Coach and mentor others on the design team
• Work with design…